Your thirties and forties are looming over you, and you can slowly feel your flexibility diminishing. This ability, which is almost innate at birth, eventually disappears and is replaced by stiffness and the pain that goes with it. But how can you regain and maintain your flexibility quickly and easily? Today, the Modern Gentleman offers you an article designed to teach you how to maintain your flexibility, in 10 minutes, every morning!
Flexibility, a capacity to be worked on to maintain it
Flexibility is a capacity that diminishes with time. Several reasons can explain this:
- The stiffening of the joints,
- The elasticity of ligaments, tendons, muscle tissue, etc…
- Muscle imbalances and muscle tone,
- Lack of balanced physical activity,
- The appearance of certain diseases or body disorders…
Even with sustained physical activity, it is possible to lose flexibility due to the increase in muscle mass, for example. It is therefore necessary to work on your flexibility independently to ensure that you keep it over time. Thus, training your flexibility will allow you to:
- Stay healthy,
- To be more fluid in your movements,
- Keep a good posture,
- Improve your performance in your sport,
- To relax your muscles and evacuate accumulated tension, etc…
How to develop your flexibility in 10 minutes every morning?
Let’s start by reminding ourselves that there are two distinct axes in the work of flexibility:
- Muscular flexibility,
Here we will try to develop the ability of our muscles to stretch.
- Joints mobility,
The objective here will be to work on the ability of your joints to move.
Together, these two axes make up flexibility.
Prepare yourself to work on your flexibility
Before you start working on your flexibility on a regular basis, let’s review. You will need to take a few steps to develop your flexibility effectively.
The first of these steps is to start by warming up. To avoid injury, start with a quick warm-up. It will allow you to warm up your muscle tissue and wake up your body. This will make it easier to work and more flexible.
The second condition to work on your flexibility is understanding that the body and the mind are linked. Before starting your flexibility session, you must work on your mental and emotional state. The objective? To be relaxed and at ease when performing your exercises. Stress, for example, is an obstacle to the proper development of your flexibility.
The last point of vigilance that we would like to mention is the equipment. Indeed, many postures require you to be partially on the ground. In this sense, we advise you to have at least one yoga mat to make your exercises more comfortable. Other types of accessories can also be purchased, such as elastics or weights, which on specific exercises, will help you improve your flexibility.
Start with joint mobility exercises
To begin, we recommend that you start with joint mobility exercises. Joint mobility, by definition, is your ability to move a joint. Good joint mobility is the ability to achieve the whole movement of a joint.
The joint mobility exercises will act as a warm-up and allow you to work your muscles with more amplitude to improve your flexibility. They are simple to perform and generally do not cause any pain. It is really about working on the stiffness of your joints, for example, by making your shoulders, wrists, knees, etc. work well.
You can, in this way, work your whole body. We have written a complete article on this subject. It explains how to maintain your joint mobility from head to toe. We advise you to start your first 3 minutes of exercises with joint mobility in this order:
- Neck
- Shoulders
- Elbows
- Wrists
- Pelvis
- Knees
- Ankles
Follow up with muscle flexibility exercises
Once you’ve warmed up, it’s time to move on to muscle flexibility exercises. These are the ones that will allow you to exceed your limits and develop your flexibility.
Muscular flexibility is the ability of your muscles and tendons to stretch, so that entire joint movement is possible. They are complementary to joint mobility. This allows you to keep your bones and muscles mobile and flexible, without stiffness.
To work on your muscular flexibility, all you need to do is stretch. There are dozens of types of stretches. Some sports, such as yoga, include postures that allow you to develop your flexibility. For our part, we offer you an article dedicated to muscle flexibility exercises that we recommend. By following this article, step by step, you will learn how to work different muscles and tendons that are important for your flexibility, for example:
- Shoulder flexibility,
- Back mobility,
- The flexibility of the legs and adductors.
So, if you want to develop your flexibility in ten minutes every morning, we recommend you plan ten minutes of warm-up for your day. These will be composed of a sequence of joint mobility exercises and muscle flexibility exercises.
Organize your sessions according to your desires and your body’s needs. You can choose to do full-body exercises every day to wake up your body and start the day on the right foot. If you do complementary sports activities, you can also choose to work the upper body one day and the lower body the next day.
You have now reached the end of this article on how to develop your flexibility in 10 minutes every morning. We hope this one will inform you about the different factors that will allow you to become more flexible. Feel free to check out our exercise articles to follow a pre-made program, and share your best stretches with us!